With david levithan dutton books

America’s Next Top Model
, 
which admittedly I had already seen, but still. 
Me: “I refuse to attend Support Group.”
Mom: “One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.”
Me: “Please just let me w
atch 
America’s Next Top Model
. It’s an activity.”
Mom: “Television is a passivity.”
Me: “Ugh, Mom, please.”
Mom: “Hazel, you’re a teenager. You’re not a little kid anymore. You need to make
friends, get out of the house, and live your life.”
Me: “If you want me to be a teenager, don’t send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID
so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot.”
Mom: “You don’t
take
pot, for starters.”

---

Me: “See, that’s the kind of thing I’d know if you got me a fake ID.”
Mom: “You’re going to Support Group.”
Me: “UGGGGGGGGGGGGG.”
Mom: “Hazel, you deserve a life.”
That shut me up, although I failed to see how attendance at Support Group met the 
definition of 
life
. Still, I agreed to go
—
after negotiating the right to record the 1.5 episodes of 
ANTM
I’d be missing.
I went to Support Group for the same reason that I’d once allowed nurses with a mere
eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically named chemicals: I 
wanted to make my parents happy. There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it 
from cancer when you’re sixteen, and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.
Mom pulled into the circular driveway behind the church at 4:56. I pretended to fiddle with my 
oxygen tank for a second just to kill time. 
“Do you want me to carry it in for you?”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. The cylindrical green tank only weighed a few pounds, and I had
this little steel cart to wheel it around behind me. It delivered two liters of oxygen to me each 
minute through a cannula, a transparent tube that split just beneath my neck, wrapped behind 
my ears, and then reunited in my nostrils. The contraption was necessary because my lungs 
sucked at being lungs. 
“I love you,” she said as I got out.
“You too, Mom. See you at six.”
“Make friends!” she said through the rolled
-down window as I walked away. 
I didn’t want to take the elevator because taking the elevator is a Last Days kind of
activity at Support Group, so I took the stairs. I grabbed a cookie and poured some lemonade 
into a Dixie cup and then turned around. 
A boy was staring at me. 
I was quite sure I’d never seen him before. Long and leanly muscular, he dwarfed the
molded plastic elementary school chair he was sitting in. Mahogany hair, straight and short. He 
looked my age, maybe a year older, and he sat with his tailbone against the edge of the chair, 
his posture aggressively poor, one hand half in a pocket of dark jeans.
I looked away, suddenly conscious of my myriad insufficiencies. I was wearing old jeans, 
which had once been tight but now sagged in weird places, and a yellow T-shirt advertising a 

---

band I didn’t even like anymore. Also my hair: I had this pageboy haircut, and I hadn’t even
bothered to, like, brush it. Furthermore, I had ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks, a side effect 
of treatment. I looked like a normally proportioned person with a balloon for a head. This was 
not even to mention the cankle situation. And yet
—
I cut a glance to him, and his eyes were 
still on me.
It occurred to me why they call it eye 
contact
. 
I walked into the circle and sat down next to Isaac, two seats away from the boy. I 
glanced again. He was still watching me. 
Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at 
best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well.
I pulled out my phone and clicked it so it would display the time: 4:59. The circle filled in 
with the unlucky twelve-to-eighteens, and then Patrick started us out with the serenity prayer: